‘Murder Hornets’ in the U.S.: The Rush to Stop the Asian Giant Hornet

Sightings of the Asian giant hornet have prompted fears that the vicious insect could establish itself in the United States and devastate bee populations.

“This is our window to keep it from establishing,” Chris Looney, a Washington State entomologist, said of the two-inch Asian giant hornet. He displayed a dead hornet on his jacket.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

BLAINE, Wash. — In his decades of beekeeping, Ted McFall had never seen anything like it.

As he pulled his truck up to check on a group of hives near Custer, Wash., in November, he could spot from the window a mess of bee carcasses on the ground. As he looked closer, he saw a pile of dead members of the colony in front of a hive and more carnage inside — thousands and thousands of bees with their heads torn from their bodies and no sign of a culprit.

“I couldn’t wrap my head around what could have done that,” Mr. McFall said.

Only later did he come to suspect that the killer was what some researchers simply call the “murder hornet.”

With queens that can grow to two inches long, Asian giant hornets can use mandibles shaped like spiked shark fins to wipe out a honeybee hive in a matter of hours, decapitating the bees and flying away with the thoraxes to feed their young. For larger targets, the hornet’s potent venom and stinger — long enough to puncture a beekeeping suit — make for an excruciating combination that victims have likened to hot metal driving into their skin.

Mr. McFall still is not certain that Asian giant hornets were responsible for the plunder of his hive. But two of the predatory insects were discovered last fall in the northwest corner of Washington State, a few miles north of his property — the first sightings in the United States.

Scientists have since embarked on a full-scale hunt for the hornets, worried that the invaders could decimate bee populations in the United States and establish such a deep presence that all hope for eradication could be lost.

“This is our window to keep it from establishing,” said Chris Looney, an entomologist at the Washington State Department of Agriculture. “If we can’t do it in the next couple of years, it probably can’t be done.”

Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Arrival of the ‘Murder Hornet’

We didn’t stop the coronavirus. But maybe we can stop the giant hornets

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Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Arrival of the ‘Murder Hornet’

Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Jessica Cheung and Annie Brown; with help from Daniel Guillemette; and edited by Lisa Tobin

We didn’t stop the coronavirus. But maybe we can stop the giant hornets

ted mcfall

So my name is Ted McFall. I live in the Pacific Northwest, northern Washington, and I am a hobby beekeeper. I’ve been a beekeeper my whole life. I grew up in a beekeeping family. My fathers kept bees. And so I’m very familiar with all things related to bees.

So on a typical day of beekeeping, I’ll usually wait until around midday. So what I’ll do is I’ll just open up the hive. I’ll puff them with some smoke, which calms them down, and then I just go through the hives and see what each individual colony needs. Whenever they’re cranky, sometimes I talk to them, and they’re trying to sting me, and I do. I talk to them. I say, hey, what’s going on? Why are you so upset? I say hey, you know, is your queen doing OK? Is your queen here? Because the queen gets sick or something happens to the queen, and that makes them cranky. Or I’m like, is a predator messing with you guys?

Basically I talk to them. I know that they don’t understand what I’m saying, so I guess really it’s more of talking to myself.

Yeah, and it is kind of funny whenever I’m going through the hive because a lot of times I do see all their little eyes all lined up along the top bars staring at me. So sometimes I do feel like I have thousands of eyes staring at me at once whenever I’m going through their home. And I know that maybe that’s a little bit of a some kind of romanticized idea of beekeeping, but I feel like maybe they do kind of recognize me and know, OK, this guy again.

mike baker

So one morning in November of last year in northern Washington state Ted McFall gets out of bed, and he’s going to go check on his hives.

ted mcfall

It was a typical morning. I made something to eat. I got all my stuff together, and I was just planning to go do a typical hiving inspection. So I went and I got my smoker and my bee equipment, my bee suit. And then I put everything in my pickup truck, and I went to the bee yard. And as I drove into the bee yard, I could see from afar kind of a dark shadow in front of one of my beehives. And I thought, oh, I wonder what that is?

mike baker

And before he even gets out of the truck he can see that something’s wrong.

ted mcfall

And as I drove closer, I noticed that those were bee bodies. There were thousands of bee bodies strewn all over the ground in front of the beehive. And as I looked at the ground where all the dead bees were, I noticed that they were all decapitated.

mike baker

Each of their heads has been removed from their bodies.

ted mcfall

I open up the beehive, and I looked inside, and it was just more carnage inside the beehive. There were just bees chopped up left and right. There were bee heads everywhere.

It was hard for me to believe that someone like that could happen without the bees being able to mount any sort of a defense because if they’re attacked by another predator, most of the time — or I think that most of time — all the time they’re able to mount a defense and kill a certain amount of the attackers. However, in this case, there was not one attacker to be found. There was just something that I could not believe. I mean, I had been a beekeeper for so many years. I have never seen anything like this.

mike baker

So he takes some pictures. He sends him to his dad.

ted mcfall

And I was going to say, hey, look at this. Do you have any ideas what the heck this could have been? And he was totally bewildered also. So I took all the bee bodies, and I just took them to the woods, and I dumped all their severed bodies and cleaned up my equipment and brought it home. And so needless to say, it bugged me for a few weeks after that, you know, thinking what the heck happened? And I just thought, well, maybe it was zombies. I have no idea what could have caused this crazy thing.

[music]

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Today, it came to the U.S. from Asia and first appeared in Washington State. The country was slow to recognize it, and now if it’s not stopped, it could reshape the country.

Mike Baker on the Asian giant hornets.

It’s Friday, May 8.

Mike, what are these insects, and where did they come from?

mike baker

So they’ve earned the nickname “the murder hornet,” but really they’re known as the Asian giant hornet, and they usually live in Asia. That’s where they have developed the nickname because they are a voracious consumer of honeybees. They’re known as an insect that can spot a colony of honeybees, mark it with a pheromone, you know, a kind of an odor that can draw them back there. Then that forager will go back to its nest, get a backup crew to go and target the hive. And then the attack begins.

michael barbaro

And what are the mechanics of this attack once this crew heads off to the hive?

mike baker

So it’s a pretty brutal scene. These hornets are so big, and they’ve got mandibles. Essentially their jaws on the front of them are enormous compared to the bees. And so the attack can be pretty swift. They can kill thousands of them in just a few hours. Each one of the hornets can kill a bee every 14 seconds because one of their main ways to make this happen is just to decapitate the bees. That’s their goal.

michael barbaro

Why? Why decapitate them?

mike baker

What they’re really after here is the part of the bee known as the thorax, essentially the bee’s chest, and they’re going to take that component back to their nest and use it to feed their young. I mean, that’s really a signature of one of their attacks as you look inside one of these hives, and all the bees are dead, and their bodies are split apart, and the honey has been left behind.

michael barbaro

They ignore the honey altogether?

mike baker

Exactly.

michael barbaro

And how did these giant Asian hornets actually get from Asia to the United States?

mike baker

Well, they didn’t fly here. There’s a lot of open questions about how it happened. I think the most common theory seems to be some sort of connection to international trade. These queens from the hornets hibernate over winter and then emerge in the spring to basically start the creation of a new colony. So did one of these queens end up at the bottom of a ship somewhere where there was enough dirt for them to establish themselves, or did they go into their base of the right bonsai tree that was going to come across the ocean and get sold at some nursery somewhere? That seems like the theory most likely to the researchers who are following this.

michael barbaro

So it’s the kind of pregnant-hornet travel theory.

mike baker

That’s right.

But what we do know is that around November of last year we started to get these indicators of the hornet here in the United States. And we heard the story of Ted McFall where his hive gets wiped out in mysterious ways. And then just a few weeks after that, a couple miles away, there’s a guy who walks out onto his porch one morning letting his dog out. And he looks down and immediately has a jarring fear because he sees the largest hornet he’s ever seen in his life.

michael barbaro

Wow.

And he’s initially sort of scared but also realizes it’s just lying there and looks to be dead, and he starts to poke around and look at it a little more closely. And as luck would have it, he had watched a YouTube video once about the Asian giant hornet.

So he has a hunch that this might be an Asian giant hornet. I mean, it didn’t make sense to him at the time because they’re not in the United States. They wouldn’t be here. But he just had enough of a hunch that he wanted to pursue it, and it ended up getting all the way to the state. And their invasive-species specialists come by and go, yeah, it actually is. It’s the Asian giant hornet. It’s here for the first time ever.

michael barbaro

So this kind of random man on the street, man on the stoop, happens to have seen the right YouTube video and then sees this hornet in his yard, notifies the authorities, and there you go, first official sighting in the U.S.?

mike baker

You got it. Thank God for YouTube finally.

michael barbaro

Finally.

So what happens once these invasive-species specialists realize what they’re dealing with?

mike baker

So this first one was in December, and around that same time there was another person in the area that had found a second one of these hornets. So there’s now been two of these worker hornets that have been discovered. But then because it’s December, these worker hornets are dying off just as part of their natural cycle, and the queens are going off to find somewhere to hibernate for winter. So there’s no longer a great way for the state to commit a bunch of resources to track these things down.

michael barbaro

They can’t really catch these hornets in the winter.

mike baker

Right. Now all of a sudden they’re sitting waiting for spring to arrive.

michael barbaro

And what happens in the spring?

mike baker

So this is really the time that the queens are going to start emerging from hibernation. They’re going to start flying around looking for a new patch of dirt to start creating a nest, building a new colony, developing a whole new network of worker hornets that are going to spend the summer foraging throughout the region.

michael barbaro

And murdering honeybees.

mike baker

More of that too.

michael barbaro

Right.

mike baker

So now is the moment. I mean, now is the chance the way this window has opened to start catching queens, tracking them down, to stop them from establishing a new nest. And it’s really a chance to stop these before it’s too late.

[music]

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

mike looney

I do have a — I have a hornets suit in the garage. We had to buy special —

mike baker

Oh, you did? Oh, really? Like extra thick or something?

speaker

Yeah.

michael barbaro

So, Mike, now we’re here. It’s the spring, this critical moment to try to stop the murderous hornets. How are the authorities in Washington trying to do that?

mike baker

So I got a chance a couple weeks ago to go out with Chris Looney, who’s the state entomologist who’s really the guy leading the war being waged against the hornets right now. It’s social-distancing time, so I put on my mask that had some cartoon bees on it.

speaker

So are you making these, basically?

mike looney

Yeah, basically.

mike baker

We meet at this forest edge, and he’s making traps out of clear fruit jugs, essentially. The regular wasp traps would be too small for the hornet to even fit in, so they’re making those.

mike looney

Yeah, we just made them out of these juice containers that we bought in bulk.

mike baker

You know, really trying a variety of strategies here to entice some of these hornets to get stuck.

mike looney

We either put a half a cup of orange juice and rice wine in it — so basically the grossest mimosa on earth for the hornets. Or this is a kefir and water blend. It’s the fermented milk protein is essentially what we’re going for there.

mike baker

Yeah, sure.

mike baker

Chris was very kind to bring some specimens along to show what these things look like. He had a bunch of them in a little jar.

mike looney

Here’s the hornets if you want to look at them.

mike baker

It’s a chunky baby carrot. This is a huge thing.

mike baker

They get up to two inches or something like that?

mike looney

The queens will get up to two inches.

mike baker

That’s a wingspan that’s almost like — that’s a wing like a dragonfly almost.

mike baker

You know, it’s got tiger stripes down the back, and its face is large enough to peer at in person, and it’s got this Spider Man teardrop eyes and a really sort of ferocious look. It’s just a — it’s a really striking sight to see them.

speaker

I feel like it’s going to come alive...

michael barbaro

It sounds like it looks like a nasty, murdering hornet.

mike baker

That sounds a good description.

michael barbaro

So how is the trap supposed to work?

mike baker

To be able to track them back to where they are. Let them back out of the jug and follow them back to their nest because it’s not that great to kill just one of these hornets. You want to be able to find the source and kill them all.

michael barbaro

And what’s the plan for what happens when a nest is found?

mike baker

So the ideal situation, you find one. You come back at nighttime when you know all the hornets are cooped up inside, and you can go in and go on the attack. I talked to this one guy in Vancouver Island in British Columbia who had the job of doing just that, going out in the middle of night and trying to eradicate this nest that they had found. He puts on his shorts and then thick sweatpants and then on top of that his bee suit. He’s got Kevlar around his wrists and ankles. I mean, he’s ready.

michael barbaro

He’s prepared.

mike baker

He’s ready for battle. But as he’s approaching the nest — I mean, he’s rustling through the bushes, and he’s got a flashlight on his head, and something about all that awakens the hive, and some of them start emerging.

michael barbaro

Uh oh.

mike baker

And just as he is about to douse the nest with carbon dioxide, he feels those first searing stabs in his leg through the bee suit, through the sweatpants, the thick sweatpants that he has.

michael barbaro

Wow.

mike baker

And he gets stung seven times, some of them drawing blood even through the bee suit.

michael barbaro

Jeez.

mike baker

And he tells me that it essentially feels like red-hot thumbtacks that are being driven into his flesh.

He wakes up the next day, and his legs are aching like he has the flu. He’s been a beekeeper and done that kind of work for many years. He’s been stung thousands of times, and he says these strings were the most painful he’s ever experienced.

michael barbaro

Mike, what happens if this eradication effort you’re describing just doesn’t work?

mike baker

So one thing is western Washington is a bit of an ideal habitat for the Asian giant hornet. It’s got plenty of woods for it to establish itself, lots of nice dirt. The hornet doesn’t do great in high altitudes or really dry plains, so there’s a lot of concern that it could quickly spread through this part of the Northwest. And then how far can go beyond there is an open question. I mean, if it hitches a ride to the right place in Colorado or the South or the Northeast, it could quickly establish itself there as well. And there’s a window here to contain and eradicate the hornet in the next year or two. And then if they have enough time and space to spread over that time period without getting wiped out, that would essentially be the end of it. Then it’s just more of a containment as opposed to an eradication strategy.

michael barbaro

And how bad a situation would that be for the United States? I’m mindful that one of the reasons this story has attracted so much attention is that honeybees are this important part of our ecosystem. So a murderous invader seems really threatening to that. But as you mentioned, these hornets have been in Japan for a really long time, and it’s not like their ecosystems have collapsed.

mike baker

Right. Yeah, it’s a part of normal life there, but there is one real important difference. And that is over time, the Japanese honeybees have evolved to fight back against the Asian giant hornet. When an Asian giant hornet approaches a hive in Japan, the bees begin a strategy of teamwork that involves surrounding the hornet and staying surrounded as a ball, so many of them that you can’t even see the hornet anymore.

michael barbaro

Wow.

mike baker

And they flex their muscles essentially like they’re flying and produce a constant heat that essentially turns their little ball into a tiny oven. And over the span of 10 minutes, then 20 minutes, then 30 minutes, and it gets warmer and warmer and warmer. The hornet eventually gets cooked to death.

michael barbaro

Wow.

mike baker

Unfortunately, the European honeybees, the Western honeybees that we have — they’re the most popular pollinators here in the United States. The researchers have looked into whether they have the same instinct, whether they have the same ability to fight back, and they don’t.

michael barbaro

So the honeybees in the U.S., they would be pretty defenseless for — I mean, in terms of evolution, a really long time.

mike baker

It seems likely that if these things are going to start targeting a variety of hives in the United States, it’s just going to be massacre after massacre after massacre.

[music]

ted mcfall

A lot of people don’t realize it, but one third of every bite that you take is dependent on honeybee. So much food would not be pollinated without honeybees. If you like apples, well, guess what? A honeybee pollinated that. If you like nuts, well, guess what? A bee pollinated that. If you like avocados, a bee pollinated that. There is so much that our bees pollinate. Actually, even they help pollinate alfalfa, which helps feed the livestock. I mean, bees do so much for us that people don’t really realize it, but if the bees find themselves in trouble, then humanity will find itself in trouble.

The only thing that we have going for us right now is the fact that it is over here in the corner of the United States. So we have it a little bit isolated. If we can get rid of them right now, there’s still hope. It’s basically a now-or-never situation. If we don’t deal with it now, then it’s going to spread over the entire United States.

michael barbaro

Mike, I’m curious how you’re thinking about this story, especially because, for the past two or three months, you have done almost nothing but write about the coronavirus pandemic.

mike baker

Yeah. I mean, it was my task there early on in the outbreak here in the Seattle area to report on the emergence of the virus, the nursing home where so many people died early on, and then continue to report and watch as it spread elsewhere across the country. And I took the opportunity for this story about the hornets as a bit of a break from that, as a bit of a reprieve, and, in some ways, thought it was just an interesting quirk of something that’s happening here and that it would just be a one-off story. Go out and do this interesting thing. It’s a curiosity but nothing major. But instead, in the process of reporting, you also had this sense of the uncanny parallels here.

Here I am reporting again on something that’s come in from Asia. It lands in Washington State first. We have just a couple cases here. There’s just a couple of them now, but it’s potentially poised to spread much further. And as I have sort of been processing that, the story, once it got published, took off in ways that I totally did not anticipate, and I’ve been trying to make sense of that too. Why are all these people from all over the country emailing me their photos of the various insects they’ve just found in their backyard? Is this the murder hornet? Is this the one here? Is it in my county? Is it in my state? And so I get the sense of others around the country, consciously or not, are seeing the same parallels of this threat that has arrived and an opportunity to stop it. And as our lives are consumed by coronavirus that we didn’t prevent it from spreading — in this case, we’re almost back at the beginning of that story and a chance to get it right.

michael barbaro

Right, we didn’t stop the coronavirus, but perhaps we can stop the hornets, and that would be something.

mike baker

That would be — that would be great.

michael barbaro

Mike, thank you very much.

mike baker

Thank you.

[music]

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Thursday, the Department of Justice dropped its criminal case against Michael Flynn, President Trump’s first national security advisor, who had pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his communications with Russia.

archived recording

We are both obviously relieved and gratified that we have an attorney general and other attorneys in the Department of Justice now with enough integrity to bring the truth to light.

michael barbaro

The decision, which was celebrated by Flynn’s lawyer on Fox, came after newly revealed documents suggested that the FBI agents lacked the proper justification to interview Flynn in the first place.

archived recording (donald trump)

I felt it was going to happen just by watching and seeing like everybody else does. He was an innocent man.

michael barbaro

Asked about the decision at the White House, President Trump immediately praised it and congratulated Flynn.

archived recording (donald trump)

So I’m very happy for General Flynn. He was a great warrior, and he still is a great warrior. Now in my book, he’s an even-greater warrior.

michael barbaro

And another 3.2 million Americans filed for unemployment last week, bringing the total number since the start of the pandemic to more than 33 million. In many states, officials say that more than a quarter of the workforce is now unemployed.

The members of Ted McFall’s beehive near Custer, Wash., had their heads torn from their bodies.Credit...Ted McFall

On a cold morning in early December, two and a half miles to the north of Mr. McFall’s property, Jeff Kornelis stepped on his front porch with his terrier-mix dog. He looked down to a jarring sight: “It was the biggest hornet I’d ever seen.”

The insect was dead, and after inspecting it, Mr. Kornelis had a hunch that it might be an Asian giant hornet. It did not make much sense, given his location in the world, but he had seen an episode of the YouTube personality Coyote Peterson getting a brutal sting from one of the hornets.

Beyond its size, the hornet has a distinctive look, with a cartoonishly fierce face featuring teardrop eyes like Spider-Man, orange and black stripes that extend down its body like a tiger, and broad, wispy wings like a small dragonfly.

Mr. Kornelis contacted the state, which came out to confirm that it was indeed an Asian giant hornet. Soon after, they learned that a local beekeeper in the area had also found one of the hornets.

Dr. Looney said it was immediately clear that the state faced a serious problem, but with only two insects in hand and winter coming on, it was nearly impossible to determine how much the hornet had already made itself at home.

Over the winter, state agriculture biologists and local beekeepers got to work, preparing for the coming season. Ruthie Danielsen, a beekeeper who has helped organize her peers to combat the hornet, unfurled a map across the hood of her vehicle, noting the places across Whatcom County where beekeepers have placed traps.

“Most people are scared to get stung by them,” Ms. Danielsen said. “We’re scared that they are going to totally destroy our hives.”

Image

Ruthie Danielsen noted the places across Whatcom County where beekeepers have placed hornet traps.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Adding to the uncertainty — and mystery — were some other discoveries of the Asian giant hornet across the border in Canada.

In November, a single hornet was seen in White Rock, British Columbia, perhaps 10 miles away from the discoveries in Washington State — likely too far for the hornets to be part of the same colony. Even earlier, there had been a hive discovered on Vancouver Island, across a strait that probably was too wide for a hornet to have crossed from the mainland.

Crews were able to track down the hive on Vancouver Island. Conrad Bérubé, a beekeeper and entomologist in the town of Nanaimo, was assigned to exterminate it.

He set out at night, when the hornets would be in their nest. He put on shorts and thick sweatpants, then his bee suit. He donned Kevlar braces on his ankles and wrists.

But as he approached the hive, he said, the rustling of the brush and the shine of his flashlight awakened the colony. Before he had a chance to douse the nest with carbon dioxide, he felt the first searing stabs in his leg — through the bee suit and underlying sweatpants.

“It was like having red-hot thumbtacks being driven into my flesh,” he said. He ended up getting stung at least seven times, some of the stings drawing blood.

Jun-ichi Takahashi, a researcher at Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan, said the species had earned the “murder hornet” nickname there because its aggressive group attacks can expose victims to doses of toxic venom equivalent to that of a venomous snake; a series of stings can be fatal.

The night he got stung, Mr. Bérubé still managed to eliminate the nest and collect samples, but the next day, his legs were aching, as if he had the flu. Of the thousands of times he has been stung in his lifetime of work, he said, the Asian giant hornet stings were the most painful.

Image

Beehives at Ms. Danielsen’s home in Birch Bay.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

After collecting the hornet in the Blaine area, state officials took off part of a leg and shipped it to an expert in Japan. A sample from the Nanaimo nest was sent as well.

A genetic examination, concluded over the past few weeks, determined that the nest in Nanaimo and the hornet near Blaine were not connected, said Telissa Wilson, a state pest biologist, meaning there had probably been at least two different introductions in the region.

Dr. Looney went out on a recent day in Blaine, carrying clear jugs that had been made into makeshift traps; typical wasp and bee traps available for purchase have holes too small for the Asian giant hornet. He filled some with orange juice mixed with rice wine, others had kefir mixed with water, and a third batch was filled with some experimental lures — all with the hope of catching a queen emerging to look for a place to build a nest.

He hung them from trees, geo-tagging each location with his phone.

In a region with extensive wooded habitats for hornets to establish homes, the task of finding and eliminating them is daunting. How to find dens that may be hidden underground? And where to look, given that one of the queens can fly many miles a day, at speeds of up to 20 miles per hour?

Image

The entomologist Chris Looney setting makeshift traps for the hornet in an industrial park in Blaine.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

The miles of wooded landscapes and mild, wet climate of western Washington State makes for an ideal location for the hornets to spread.

In the coming months, Mr. Looney said, he and others plan to place hundreds more traps. State officials have mapped out the plan in a grid, starting in Blaine and moving outward.

The buzz of activity inside a nest of Asian giant hornets can keep the inside temperature up to 86 degrees, so the trackers are also exploring using thermal imaging to examine the forest floors. Later, they may also try other advanced tools that could track the signature hum the hornets make in flight.

If a hornet does get caught in a trap, Dr. Looney said, there are plans to possibly use radio-frequency identification tags to monitor where it goes — or simply attach a small streamer and then follow the hornet as it returns to its nest.

While most bees would be unable to fly with a disruptive marker attached, that is not the case with the Asian giant hornet. It is big enough to handle the extra load.